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Off We Go Again!!

Posted by Boghound on March 2, 2013

Industry Hit Mega with Copyright Complaints

Kim Dotcom started his new file-sharing site late January and has already got 150 copyright notices.

Nevertheless, Kim isn’t letting this pressure from the entertainment industry get him down. Actually, he is using it as proof that he really is legal. According to the site’s attorney, Mega has reacted promptly to copyright infringements and made an official announcement that it doesn’t want people to use the service for infringing purposes. The website allows people to store 50GB for free which can be shared among users. This would have been an invitation for piracy in the good old days, but Kim Dotcom has claimed he designed the site to avoid copyright infringement allegations which marred MegaUpload.

Dotcom made a promise that any violating material to be found on his Mega will be removed, and this promise is already being put to the test. However, a French service called Mega-search.me is currently showing copyrighted content, including “Django Unchained”, Microsoft Office packages and a tune by Elton John, on Mega’s servers.

The matter is that the content shared on Mega can be decrypted only if the uploader shares the encryption key, i.e. Mega can’t “see” what’s being uploaded on its servers. According to Kim’s lawyers, Mega was responsive to notices of copyright violation, including assisting some in fixing incomplete or defective notices. The site had already received 150 takedown requests from not only the US, but also other countries.

Despite the fact that Mega doesn’t have a search engine, like MegaUpload did, one of the French websites is already offering people the chance to browse Mega: Mega-search. By the way, an attempt to find out who owns this search engine failed. The only thing that is clear about Mega-search is that the service is hosted by OVH in France and uses a San Francisco-based company – CloudFlare.

Anyway, the site lawyers insist that the recently launched Mega should be treated as any legitimate cloud-storage service. It is normal that copyright extremists heckle such dual-use technologies focusing on the bad uses and ignoring the socially beneficial uses. However, the industries will surely put the new cyberlocker to the test, particularly with Dotcom still waiting for the extradition trial to be concluded.